In the Fairy Tale Rapunzel, captive Rapunzel's long, "golden" hair, provides her captor and her lover access to her while providing Rapunzel access to nourishment, sex, romance and the prospect of freedom. Rapunzel's hair mediates her relationship to the world and it signifies both her color and her sex.

Unlike the braided style of Rapunzel's hair which acts as a rope for others to mount and climb, in my piece, "Untitled (Rapunzel)," I depict loose hair. With medium and support, I make a one to one comparison of Black hair and black mark, building layers of marks to create a bushy mass. My often used image of an inverted head signals a shift away from traditional portraiture and into the "auto-mythic."

Automythography is a term and a strategy initiated by author Audre Lorde. I use the word to describe my most recent body of work. The form blends cultural history and myth with personal narrative. By combining these elements, I am able to integrate representational forms and types relating to both painting and photography and spanning portraiture, fiction, realism and abstraction. Collectively, this embodies the function of the work, as a deployment of the tools of self-invention and self-representation.

I am a woman of mixed ethnic origin, East Indian and African American. My works are self-portraits. My process begins by performing gestures in front of a camera using a remote shutter control. Through preliminary drawing, I develop the imagined elements of the work such that the flow from the head is also a flow from the mind. With medium and image, I propose that identity, including racial and sexual identities, although narrowly defined by social norms, is both fluid and plural. In response to the history of Black hair as a barometer of social and personal consciousness, I make the image of hair both corporeal and conceptual, giving it the psychic proportions hair has in the lives of Black people.

All images © Mequitta Ahuja, 2009